


Pyriscence

by nostalgicatsea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Hope vs. Despair, Introspection, M/M, POV Outsider, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 07:31:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea
Summary: In the wake of the Decimation, there's nothing but total destruction, death and chaos that spread like wildfire, uncontained. All Natasha can do is hold fast to her hope in the aftermath—hope that there’s a way out. Hope that Tony will come back to them. To Steve.





	Pyriscence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabrecmc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabrecmc/gifts).



> Pyriscence - (n.) The adaptation of a plant to a fire-prone environment/the release of seeds triggered by the presence of heat or fire.
> 
> This is my [Marvel Trumps Hate](https://marveltrumpshate.tumblr.com) gift for sabrecmc. Sabre, thank you for bidding on me and doing everything you did to make MTH a success, from participating as both a creator and a bidder to signal boosting our posts and, of course, donating so much to charity! You're one of the kindest, supportive, and most generous people in the fandom. This is different from what I initially planned (it's much more introspective and the beginning and end of certain relationships had to be more open-ended) and it's my first time writing an outsider POV, but I hope you like it.
> 
> Thank you, [aslightstep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslightstep), for helping me figure out that the ending I thought was right was, in fact, right, and saving my head from figuratively becoming a bloody mess because up until I talked to you, I was bashing it against the wall for about a month.

Natasha watches whole battalions disintegrate, both on their side and Thanos’s, and thinks that Thanos is a man of his word despite his mercilessness and cruelty. He’s an undiscerning judge and executioner, as fair as he claimed he would be.  
  
But the universe doesn’t care about fairness. If it did, she wouldn’t be standing here instead of those who were truly good, those who deserved new beginnings, though she can’t tell which fate is worse, being killed the way they were or being one of the lucky few to survive by pure chance.  
  
The sky is choked with sooty flakes, Death’s winter in spring. Outside their grove, the ground undulates with mounds of ash rising from the scarred battlefield. It reminds her of the Dilmun tumuli she saw in Bahrain eighteen years ago. Almost all of the world’s largest funerary grounds have been destroyed over the past fifty years, but it’s as if those burial mounds were restored and transported to the fields in front of her. There are so many gone. From here, where she’s standing, the hills stretch to the ends of Earth.  
  
Around the world, around every known and unknown corner of the universe, this is all anyone will find. A death toll that rises and will continue to rise—billions and trillions and higher still—untold numbers both horrifying and meaningless in their enormity.  
  
Natasha sees but doesn’t comprehend. None of them do.  
  
Once something gets too big, the human mind struggles to understand or respond to it. The depth of the oceans. The distance to the moon. The size of the universe. Incalculably large numbers. All outside the realm of perception, more concept than reality, than solid, tangible existence.  
  
They survey catastrophe, hundreds here lost, even more elsewhere, and reduce it to digestible pieces.  
  
Sam. James. Wanda. Vision. T’Challa. And on and on.  
  
If there were really such a thing as fairness, she wouldn’t be standing here instead of them.  
  
The remaining Avengers are all caught in a loop, playing a reel of their friends’ last moments in their heads. They build their dead back up from the mounds only to watch them fall apart until Thor rises out of his stupor and speaks. Slowly, as though awakening from a collapsing dream, everything disintegrating but the single idea occupying his mind, he rasps out the first words after the massacre, cementing the nightmare they’re in as their new reality.  
  
“Where’s Tony?” he asks, feeble in a way they’ve never seen him before, and for the second time in minutes, all Natasha can do is watch her loved ones fall apart, Steve, Jim, and Bruce caving in from the fatal hit.  
  
There’s no answer they can give. There’s nothing they can do.  
  
The sky above them is whole; there’s no tin man falling out of the sky. Tony’s trapped beyond the wormhole he never truly came back from, and countless have been slain by an alien wielding impossible power.  
  
There is no victory.  
  
There never have been any, just stopgaps.  
  
They defeated the infantry, thinking foot soldiers as generals, one battle an entire war—naïveté that was drummed out of her at a young age, that Tony warned against.  
  
Sam. James. Wanda. Vision. T’Challa.  
  
Tony.  
  
There’s no difference between those gone and those still here, Natasha realizes. This too is death, just a different kind.

 

Sam used to say that it was important to maintain routines when grieving, to have a shred of normalcy when things were nowhere near normal. He made sure to remind them of that when the days melted from one to the next and they drifted from place to place.  
  
Normalcy, now that they’re back at the compound, means slipping back into old habits, trying them on to see if they still fit. It means sleeping in a bed that molds to her curves, comfortable and too pliant at once, and eating the best food money can buy with Tony’s favorite snacks greeting her every time she opens the fridge. It means training with state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind workout equipment, honing her body for a battle that already occurred and a battle she can’t hope to win.  
  
Normalcy for Steve means shedding his suit. It means changing his clothes and cleaning up. Taking a razor to his face and shaving off his beard, shaving off age and guilt and depression and everything else Natasha has seen him carry since the fight over the Accords, because he’s finally home, he can finally rest, he can finally be himself once more.  
  
It’s all wrong.  
  
He looks too young and too worn at once. He looks like the man he was two years ago, but Natasha can see that he doesn’t feel any more like himself than he did on the run. She doesn’t have to tell him it’s because that person no longer exists. He’s not who he used to be—none of them are after Thanos—but he hasn’t been the same since his fallout with Tony.  
  
She catches him staying in one place for hours at a time when he isn’t going through the motions, peering out at nothing and saying nothing. He’s a lighthouse waiting for a ship to return to him, one unaware that it’s gone dark and deserted. There’s no light to guide the ship, nothing to welcome it if, by some miracle, it made it back.  
  
She has seen Steve like this before, though never to this extent. When Steve worked for SHIELD, he had been a mausoleum, a burial collection of memories and artifacts gathering dust, of regrets and everything that he would have rather forgotten but couldn’t for reasons that were too familiar to her.  
  
The difference is that she remembers as reparation and he as preservation. He had carried his loved ones forward, clutching them to his chest, stepping inside himself and sealing the entrance behind him to keep them and himself safe. He let no one in and let nothing out.  
  
She had wanted to pull Steve out of there; it was no place for the living and despite all odds, despite how Steve may have felt, he wasn’t dead yet. But all she managed to do was open the door an inch and wriggle through the crack, letting some light and air follow her in, hoping that would be enough to coax him out.  
  
Tony simply blew the hinges off of the doors.  
  
She should have known better; as much as she and Steve value companionship, they don’t build their lives around it. They build their lives around purpose—and Tony gave both of them that until they lost it again.  
  
They had been adrift without it, Steve more than her because she had found her place in the world years before, with SHIELD and with Clint, but Steve hadn’t until Tony came calling.  
  
His entire home, the only one he had in this new century, was with the Avengers.  
  
All that remains of them now is a team half-gone, a compound silent in death, and the man who gave him everything, who had been the foundation of his home, its bones and its core, lost to him in every way possible.  
  
Thanos couldn’t claim that loss. He made it more certain and unassailable, but Steve had lost Tony on his own and there will be no closure for that. No absolution unless Tony comes back and maybe not even then.  
  
Natasha wonders if Steve understood what that meant. What Tony meant.

 

She gets her answer later.  
  
It’s one of the rare times that Steve wants to talk. Most days, he doesn’t say or do anything beyond what’s necessary to keep the world from descending fully into chaos.  
  
He walked away from everything to be Steve Rogers; this time, he walks in the opposite direction. He’s Captain America all the time now, and he doesn’t want to be that, not when he failed the world so badly, but he wants to be Steve Rogers even less.  
  
She doesn’t understand why she asks. Steve faced everything straight on except matters that would force him to reexamine his relationship with Tony or put it in jeopardy. But maybe that said everything.  
  
“Do you know you love him?” she wanted to ask before and on the run and when the team split over the Accords and when Tony stepped down after Ultron. When they said their goodbyes, lingering on the grounds, not too far from where they are now. When they shared a room without fuss at Clint’s house, still gravitating towards each other despite their anger and distrust. All the way back to when they brought down a leftover Hydra base, the first time the team was a cohesive unit, every piece snapping into place, each of them a part of a seamless whole.  
  
Steve sought Tony in the aftermath, bright and happy as though reborn. She had never seen him like that before in all the years she had known him.  
  
But it’s not the right question to ask, when Steve already answered it somewhere along the way even if she can’t pinpoint exactly when.  
  
Even if she somehow missed it, the way he clasps his phone so carefully reveals everything. He holds it as though it’s something precious, as though it’s Tony’s heart he has in his palm except he would never dare to indulge in sentimentality of that kind. That’s arrogance and greed that he can’t allow, to think that Tony was his in any way, to think that Tony could be his. To take him like that when he took so much from him already. Tony never belonged to him.  
  
That’s what Steve believes, she knows.  
  
She also knows this: Tony handed over his heart to Steve—to all of them but most of all to Steve—along with the keys to his house the day he recruited them.  
  
Even if Steve knew that, Natasha isn’t sure he would keep it anyway. She knows he thinks himself undeserving.  
  
She knows it’s because he loves Tony.  
  
_“He had it on him at the park,” she reminds Steve on their way to Wakanda, when she finds him staring at the phone he kept fully charged and on him at all times for the past two years._  
  
_Not his lab. Not the compound. Tony wasn’t on Avengers business when Strange found him and took him straight to the Sanctum. He hadn’t gone back to get it._  
  
_It said a lot, Natasha thinks, but Steve replies as if what she said is a puzzle he can’t solve rather than an answer to the question that’s been on his mind since he heard Bruce on the line instead of Tony._  
  
_“I know,” he says, but he has the phone in his hand even as they step off of the plane hours later._  
  
_It isn’t enough._  
  
So she asks something else as she sits besides him in the courtyard.  
  
“When did you know you loved him?”  
  
The question looms between them, eclipsing everything but its present and future. Nothing is as important as Steve’s answer and nothing is as meaningless. It changes everything. It changes nothing.  
  
They can talk about this now. There’s nothing else left.  
  
It’s so quiet out here. The grass rustles in the breeze, the only perceptible sound for miles, the air rippling through it the only change. Had it not been for how well the grounds have been maintained, the compound would feel abandoned.  
  
She wonders if it was like that for Tony. There are more Avengers here after the Decimation than before it.  
  
Not too far from where they’re sitting, Wanda and Vision’s plants bend in the wind, still here, still growing. A few shy nubs poke out between the more mature ones, the palest green as though they’re not sure of their existence yet. They remind her of Vision phasing through the walls, the jewel tones of his skin washed out, and the tentativeness between him and Wanda at the start of their tenure with the Avengers and later, their changed relationship.  
  
Their plants have been tended to, upright and healthy even in their absence, and Natasha’s weapons cache is as spotless as she left it, not a mote of dust in sight.  
  
There are new items in it too, ones that were prototypes before she left but are now complete.  
  
Steve sucks in a breath, and she zeroes in on him again as she retreats to the safety of her question, on Steve’s emotions rather than her own.  
  
“I knew while I was losing him. Not at first but…” he trails off, unsure of how to explain when exactly he knew.  
  
Natasha thinks it must have dawned on him like a muted sunrise, imperceptible until the accumulated knowledge became too big and bright to miss. A process, not a singular moment.  
  
“Losing him.” A laugh escapes from him, misshapen from the darkness it’s been lying dormant in since Siberia, forgotten, something hideous that shouldn’t have been brought into the light. “I’d go an entire lifetime without ever seeing or talking to him again if it meant that he was here and he was safe.”  
  
What had he known about loss? What did the loss of his relationship with Tony matter in the face of losing Tony entirely?  
  
Natasha doesn’t have an answer, only an understanding that she can’t put into words. She opts to hold his hand instead, the one curled over the phone, as though she can hold onto Tony with Steve and pull Tony back in from whatever place he’s lost in.  
  
“He’s the bravest man I know, and I never told him that.”  
  
Steve’s voice splinters. For the first time, Natasha sees him laid bare.  
  
No. That isn’t right.  
  
Pepper and Tony’s engagement announcement.  
  
The rush of breath that left Steve like someone had slid a knife between his ribs when they walked past a café in Porto playing it on TV. The missed step as he exhaled. The shattered misery on his face that he used to hide so well until Tony blew apart his defenses in Siberia, mangling everything impossibly out of shape so that he couldn’t weld his walls shut again.  
  
That was the first time.  
  
They could have had each other was the thing. But Steve never thought he had a chance with Tony and didn’t even walk up to the starting line, and Tony never thought Steve would want a chance and didn’t even give him one.  
  
_Stupid_ , she thinks, but communication had always been their downfall.  
  
Steve exhales wetly, and Natasha is startled to find him crying when she lifts her head. He makes no motion to wipe his face when she does, and she’s at a loss as to how to respond. She has never seen him like this. His sadness was the kind that deadened, not the kind that cut into the meat of someone and ripped them open, leaving them naked and confused and scared by its wildness.  
  
When he has enough composure to continue, his voice trembles with shaky reproach and regret, with the loss of everything—of Tony, their friends, his home, his purpose, billions of innocents, of everything—he had to endure.  
  
“I love him, and I never told him that either. You’d think I’d learn.”  
  
His life is one of missed chances. Of what-ifs he had to bury, of things that haven’t been said or done, at least not with the right people.  
  
“Earth just lost her best defender,” he said to Ross, to the team, to everyone but the one person who needed to hear it most.  
  
They had been like that since the start, these two, telling everyone but each other how much they saw the soul of the other person, how much they truly respected each other.  
  
_If you were here to see him now_ , she tells Tony in her head like he can hear her, _if you saw him and he saw you—_  
  
It didn’t matter. It was too late. Steve was always late in matters like this, and the entire team was late in heeding Tony’s words, in finally understanding his grim warnings about the threats that he faced alone, about his greatest fears.  
  
_“He’s the bravest man I know.”_  
  
In her mind, Tony faces all of the deaths he wasn’t supposed to come back from but did—Afghanistan and palladium poisoning and the wormhole.  
  
In her mind, he’s off to the side as she and the others take in Avengers Tower for the first time, too deliberately casual to be anything but as he floats the idea of forming the Avengers again.  
  
He’s desperately trying to rein Ross back, pleading with a man he hated and never once bowed to until that moment, quick to swallow his pride and grovel if it bought their friends safety.  
  
He's standing strong at the airport, his voice breaking, allowing it to break, allowing them to see how much they mean to him, how much he needs and wants Steve at his side.  
  
He’s letting them in and believing in them, seeing their potential the way Steve saw the best in them.  
  
He’s brave and brilliant. He got both himself and the team out of dire straits and to the summits of their best selves, using risky, unconventional, and clever methods to survive and grow and then later, help them all thrive.  
  
And so Natasha says the only thing that comes to mind, something that isn’t empty words of comfort but the truth.  
  
“If he’s out there, he’ll come back.”  
  
Her voice is steady and so is her heart because it’s not false hope; it’s probability, a solid bet hedged on calculations from previous situations.  
  
There’s no guarantee that Tony’s alive. But if he is, he’s brave and brilliant enough to find his way to them. Natasha’s more certain of this than anything else.

 

Months later, Tony proves her right.  
  
She’s with Jim and Steve in the conference room when FRIDAY alerts them that she has a message for them from Tony. Bruce is in the lab, Thor and Rocket somewhere else in the compound with their newest addition to the group, Carol, and Clint hasn’t reached out to them even though they know he’s alive.  
  
It’s fitting that they're the only ones present, meaningful in a way that of all the Avengers, they’re the ones receiving his message. They’re inextricably and eternally tied to Tony, more so than any of the others on the team had been. They’ve known Tony longest. Their lives have been intertwined with his since the beginning. Before the beginning. Before they formed the Avengers, before Tony became Iron Man, before Tony led Stark Industries. In Steve’s case, even before Tony was born.  
  
But really, they’re there because they’re the only active soldiers left on the team. They’re coordinating with what remains of the world’s militaries and the UN. There’s a light blinking insistently on the phone that FRIDAY muted to deliver the message; they’re supposed to be on a call with Ross.  
  
They ignore it.  
  
Jim directs FRIDAY to play Tony’s video immediately. His calm authority, so different from Steve’s fragile calmness as he asks if this is an old message, reminds her that Jim led the search for Tony a decade ago and refused to give up long after Tony’s chances of survival dwindled to almost zero and there were no signs of Tony still being alive.  
  
He’s sturdy and unruffled like this is a routine mission call.  
  
Steve, on the other hand, stands rigidly as though any sudden move will have a butterfly effect that will ripple out and somehow kill Tony.  
  
He’s so careful when it comes to Tony now, unnecessarily so.  
  
His phone, cheap and useless, is still as perfect and undamaged as it was when he first got it.  
  
His shield is still locked away. He knows where it is. He knows the password. Tony didn’t change it. Natasha tested it. She didn’t know whether to laugh or grieve over that or that neither he nor Steve have unlocked the vault since the shield was put into storage when she asks FRIDAY when it was last accessed.  
  
His uniform, the one he wears when they go out to help nowadays, is his old stealth suit. The dirty, fraying one that he constantly wore on the run even when it was wiser to change outfits as she and Sam did was barely salvageable after the fight with Thanos, not that he’d want to see it anyway. There’s blood and ash on it that won’t come out even when it’s clean.  
  
But of all the backups, he chose that one and Natasha knows it’s because of all the suits Tony made him, that one was made for SHIELD, tailored to their specifications. Commissioned work rather than a gift.  
  
The video floods the screen and shows the innards of an alien ship. Natasha has no idea what she’s looking at. Tony is off-screen.  
  
“This is Major Tom to Ground Control,” he drawls, and Natasha hates and loves him in equal measure for the morbid joke. She misses that. She misses him.  
  
She knows what he’s saying and why and Jim does too. Only Steve doesn’t, but he will soon.  
  
Tony laughs humorlessly. There’s something wrong with the sound, a wheezy breathlessness that Steve instantly recognizes. Color drains from his face rapidly, leaving behind a ghastly pallor. His lips move with a silent message to Tony that she can’t read; he can’t seem to work out what to say. It doesn’t matter. His clenched fists and his eyes say plenty. Terror washes in behind the wave of relief, consuming it before it even reaches shore.  
  
She wants to reach into the video and adjust the angle so she can see Tony, and as though he can hear her thoughts, Tony knocks what she assumes is his helmet with his foot so that it faces him. As soon as he does, she knows. One glance tells her everything.  
  
“Oh, Shellhead,” she nearly sighs, but he’s speaking now and none of them want to talk over him.  
  
He’s talking and she should concentrate, but all she can focus on is the limitless darkness beyond him that she’s only seen once before. The same desperation that she felt back when she craned her neck and stared at the wormhole years ago, urging Tony to come back so she wouldn’t have to do what needed to be done, lights every single one of her nerves on fire. She feels like she condemned him to his fate again, making the call to leave him to die, leaving him no choice but to go into space alone once more.  
  
She called him narcissistic and said he didn’t play well with others, that she recommended Iron Man but not Tony Stark, but it’s Tony who’s in that suit. Tony, who flew that bomb out into space without hesitation, not sure of what he would meet and the end he would meet. Tony whom she abandoned to the wolves twice. Three times, she corrects, as the phone lights up a belligerent red again, no doubt Ross bullheadedly refusing to leave them alone.  
  
God. Of all the people to make it, she thinks, but cockroaches can survive just about anything.  
  
The video cuts off, Tony visibly exhausted even just from talking as he reaches over to end the recording. He’s shaking, clumsy, bumping the helmet before he finds the switch. The screen turns dark, and the black void leaks out of the screen and into the room. It fills the hardened hollow Thanos left inside of her, tacky and deadly like poisonous sap.  
  
For a minute, none of them know what to say. They don’t know if Tony gave them information about his ship to track him down and rescue him or to bring him home for burial.  
  
The video’s a day old.  
  
Tony is, most likely, a ghost speaking from the past. Natasha tries very hard not to think of his body floating in space, an empty and abandoned corpse devoid of his spark.  
  
Jim breaks the silence. His voice is steady even though he must be as terrified and elated and heartbroken as she and Steve are.  
  
“He’ll find a way to get back to us.”  
  
She wonders how he can believe that. Oxygen’s running dangerously low for Tony if it hasn’t run out already.  
  
Hope is risky, but Jim’s confident and unwavering in his faith. There’s fire in his eyes, and Natasha knows this is exactly how he must have looked when he disregarded his superiors’ warnings and nearly destroyed his career to continue his search for Tony.  
  
“How?” she asks.  
  
What she means is how can he do this over and over again? How can he almost lose Tony so many times and manage not to break? But it’s a question that’s an answer to itself. It’s because he has that he can hold himself together like Tony needs him to.  
  
Jim confirms her thoughts. “You get used to it,” he says. “I can’t even remember how many times I almost lost Tony over the past thirty years. He always pulls through no matter what. You never know how he’ll manage to until he does, but he does.”  
  
“There’s no such thing as ‘impossible’ when it comes to Tony Stark,” Steve offers, and there’s admiration in his voice even if it bleeds with grief.  
  
“That’s right,” Jim agrees. “Now let’s help him come home.”  
  
Natasha realizes that Jim is right. Tony always comes back, and the person who saves him has always been Tony himself. This is his signal flare in the desert, an explosion they have to follow.  
  
_We’ll meet you halfway_ , she thinks as she clicks on the intercom and calls the rest of the Avengers down to the room, ideas already forming in her head. They won’t let him down. Not like they have before. Not on this.

 

Pepper flies in straight from Tennessee as soon as they tell her what Tony left them and Thor sends Carol to the coordinates Tony gave. They argue whether they should, if it’s crueler to get her hopes up when they might fail or to let her continue thinking there’s no way to reach him, alive or dead. They choose to tell her but feel stupid when they do. Of course Tony would have left her a message.  
  
“How is he?” Jim asks somberly as she drops her bag onto the couch and then drops onto it next to him too.  
  
“He asked about Tony.”  
  
Pepper covers her face. There’s a weary quake thinning out her voice that Natasha has never heard before, not even when Tony was dying and she didn’t know what was happening, just that he was behaving erratically and that every day, there were big fires to put out.  
  
Not for the first time, Natasha’s forced to confront just how little she knows about Tony Stark. She’s sorry, not the way that she was back when she wanted to apologize to Tony for seeing only what he wanted her to see when writing her report. She’s sorry for herself. It’s a rare feeling. But she’s known Tony for nearly a decade, and she thought that she would know him better by now.  
  
Being let in is a privilege. She doesn’t know if she’s won it and lost it or if she’s ever truly earned it in the first place when it comes to him.  
  
The last time they spoke, he had lashed out at her, an ancient distrust that she had worked so hard to break down rising up to the surface in an instant.  
  
He didn’t even need to speak. It was there on his face, the rigidity of his body, as soon as she entered the room.  
  
_You never changed your colors. You’re the same person you were when I met you._  
  
She’s not sorry for who she is and what she did, but she is sorry that everything she worked hard to repair was gone just like that with one decision. She repaid Steve’s belief in her since their days in D.C. She didn’t do that for Tony, not nearly enough if he thought she was double-crossing him when it wasn’t about choosing sides.  
  
Tony doesn’t have family or friends in Tennessee. Nobody in his circle does.  
  
_Who’s “he”?_  
  
She feels like an intruder.  
  
Rhodey slides over a beer to Pepper. “What did you tell him?”  
  
“What you told me. Harley’s not stupid.”  
  
“No, Tones has a thing for kids who are too smart for their own good.” He glances at the untouched beer before adding, lightly like it’s a joke and lightly like he’s afraid of hurting her, “I wonder why.”  
  
Pepper finally sounds like herself when she laughs and uncovers her face. Her bangs stick up messily and her skin’s blotchy. Natasha has observed Pepper—has been friends with Pepper—long enough to know that means Pepper’s either angry or on the verge of tears. Or sometimes a mix of both, where Tony's concerned.  
  
“This feels like Afghanistan all over again. We’re just missing takeout from Dynasty Kitchen.” She smiles humorlessly at the bottle of beer, picking it up and rubbing the ridges of the cap but not popping it off.  
  
Natasha hates seeing her like this. It feels wrong, and it’s unfair—Pepper’s only human, and no one knows how to react to what Thanos did because no one was prepared for it—but Pepper has always been collected even in the midst of chaos, has never been lost the way she is now.  
  
“Or Roseanne’s,” Natasha says. She and Pepper ordered pizza too many times to count during their all-nighters, trying to do damage control for SI, to wrest the impossible and insurmountable into submission. She quashes the feeling that she’s interrupting something private as she walks to the couch and places a hand on Pepper’s shoulder. “We did it before,” she says quietly, but it comes out more unstable than she likes, a note of doubt diluting her confidence.  
  
She’s not sure how Pepper will take this. She doesn’t know how Pepper feels about what happened with the Accords or what Tony, Jim, or Vision might have told her. She hasn’t seen Pepper at the compound since they came back from Wakanda.  
  
“It’s not like last time,” Pepper replies, and it hurts more than it should, but the pain eases when she explains, “We have you, Bruce, Steve, and Thor, Carol and Rocket…the whole world. Tony’s got all of us trying to get him back. We’re not doing this alone.”  
  
There’s no lingering rancor even if she and Jim would have been well within their rights to be angry with them. Natasha wouldn’t have blamed them if they had left Steve and her out in the cold, keeping them at arm’s length after everything.  
  
But they welcomed them back, and just like Jim didn’t hesitate to embrace her, Pepper doesn’t as she places her hand over Natasha’s on her shoulder and holds onto her. It’s invaluable, this level of forgiveness and acceptance into their circle and Tony’s, this trust. Natasha doesn’t know if it’s earned, but she’ll do everything she can so that it is and that she can keep it regardless.  
  
“No, he has us,” she allows herself to promise.

 

Their belief pays off when an aircraft flies towards the compound and they all run out to meet it, squinting in the darkness at the floodlights overhead. FRIDAY didn’t say anything which means it didn’t need clearance to touch down and that means…  
  
That means…  
  
She’s afraid to jump to conclusions however likely they may be, to hope, but Tony’s always been the promise of it, of Houdini-esque escapes and victories against the unbeatable, of something better to come. Hope personified.  
  
He doesn’t have powers and he isn’t the strongest of them all, but Steve considered him Earth’s best defender for a reason and so does she.  
  
The ship lands, and all of them stand tensely in a row, a somber welcoming party. Carol’s a comet tearing the night sky into two behind it, burning too brightly for them to see her face even if it hadn’t been covered by her helmet—but it doesn’t matter because the ramp descends and Tony appears at the entrance.  
  
Relief rushes through Natasha, so electrifying that her brain goes fuzzy with numb shock.  
  
She stays put, something solidifying inside her chest, blocking the air from reaching her lungs, while Jim shoots forward to meet him, probably faster than he should with the way his legs are. She can’t do anything so she does what she does best: observe.  
  
She goes by facts. Solid ground. Things she knows with certainty, things that will ground her and help drive the static out of her head.  
  
Fact number one: Tony’s running on grief and fumes, haggard and sallow enough that he looks like he died and was resurrected moments ago.  
  
Fact number two: There were others.  
  
This wasn’t a ship they had the fortune to find or steal; Rocket had recognized it. Tony’s wearing a well-worn jacket she’s never seen before, and his shirt is too big and hangs too loosely on him and not just from weight loss. Rocket and the blue woman who walked down with Tony stare at each other too long and too silently. Peter Parker’s nowhere to be seen.  
  
There were others and they didn’t make it.  
  
Natasha thinks, incongruously, of the empty compound grounds, of Avengers Tower, the mansion in Malibu, and the old Stark mansion on Long Island. She thinks of the large expanse of them all and of the darkness of space, Tony in the middle of it, alone and as small as he is now, and the spell breaks.  
  
She rushes to him before her mind catches up to her body, breathing him in once Rhodey and Bruce have greeted him. He’s frail in her arms, made brittler when he stiffens in surprise. For a second, a grid of ugly black lines flashes in her mind, and she recalls his flesh sinking beneath the puncture of her needle, feverishly hot and malleable.  
  
She allows herself to skim the nape of his neck, near the spot where she stabbed him, even though she’s been careful about touching him since that moment in the diner nearly a decade ago. Linking arms was okay. Touching his shoulder when he knew she was there was too. Gestures that are carefully and loudly telegraphed but nothing more intimate than that.  
  
The blue woman tenses, her strange eyes narrowing, but ferocity is replaced by surprise and then, as she relaxes almost imperceptibly, a flicker of sad recognition as though she’s seen this before, experienced this before, when Tony unfreezes and wraps his arms around her too, holding her as fiercely as he held Rhodey.  
  
Natasha’s eyes sting.  
  
She thinks about forgiveness and about love. She thinks about the gifts Tony gave her over the years and the ones he continued to make for her after she left.  
  
She hopes that he knows she wasn’t choosing between Steve and him when she let Steve and James escape, and he must because he’s holding her like he doesn’t want to let go.  
  
“You know, I always admired your ability to look stunning even when things go to shit,” he mumbles into her hair, curling a lock that’s still blond around his finger. It’s grown in the past months, turning into an untamed mess of scarlet and gold, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to chop off her dyed hair. She still doesn’t feel like herself. She couldn’t care less about how she looks and hasn’t looked at her reflection in a long time.  
  
She cracks a smile; the fracture goes straight down to her heart. It’s painful.  
  
“I could say the same for you.”  
  
Except this time, and they both know it. His smile mirrors hers, and he’s gaunt, skinnier and tinier than he was in his press conference after Afghanistan, from his battle with palladium poisoning. He’s all cheekbones and sunken skin and big, sad eyes that look past her to see what remains of the team.  
  
She lets go of him and turns, stepping to his side.  
  
Steve’s the only one left, and he stands at a distance as though he wants to give Tony and the rest of them space or he isn’t sure he’s welcome. He’s pale, nearly translucent in the darkness now that the lights of the ship have shut off, like he has seen a ghost or is one himself.  
  
If this meeting happened before Thanos, Natasha would have been frustrated with the way neither of them move towards each other, but she can’t blame them for their impasse. Mourning for so long and so deeply left her floundering for what to say, and the pain Steve and Tony share runs deeper, miles underground, past the mantle down to the core. They’re not so much standing across trench lines, refusing to be the first to step into no man’s land, as they are stranded on opposite banks of a river, unsure of its depth and strength and afraid the bridge frayed and mostly sunken in its waters won’t hold their weight. Each word holds a different mass, and the wrong one could snap the bridge and sweep them away in an unforgivable current.  
  
But silence has never served the two of them well, and Natasha wants them to break it, to avoid the same pitfalls as before, leaving things unsaid, letting too much time pass. They’ve both been hurting for too long.  
  
Steve seems to think the same thing because there are no right words for their reunion, but he manages to find the right one anyway.  
  
“Tony,” he breathes out like an apology and a wish, like there’s nothing in the world but the name on his lips and the half-dead man in front of him.  
  
It comes out as little more than a whisper, thin and delicate enough that it should break from all that it holds but doesn’t. Everything he needs to say is contained in those two syllables alone, and Tony must hear it because he lurches forward, more out of instinct than conscious thought. He lifts his hand before catching himself as if he needs, just as much as Steve does, to know that this is real, neither an illusion nor a dream that he’d wake up from.  
  
The movement’s magnetic—Tony’s magnetic. His gravitational pull is something Steve has never been able to resist ever since they met. It tugs Steve forward, out of the darkness.  
  
In the radiant glow of Carol’s light as she descends to Earth a few feet away like a falling star, Natasha can see that he’s been crying silently this entire time.  
  
Tony sees it too. It stops him in his tracks and when he speaks, his words come out crumbled.  
  
“You made it through,” he says shakily. Carol powers down, dimming their surroundings, but his eyes are still bright, wet with moonlight and unshed emotion.  
  
“Of course I did. I promised.”  
  
“You can’t—” Tony shakes his head, but the familiarity of whatever impossible stubbornness Steve must have shown makes him break into a disbelieving, almost exasperated, laugh. There’s a tinge of hysteria to it, a sob lurking under the surface. “That’s not something you have any power over. You didn’t have a say in this. None of us did.”  
  
“I know, but I meant it. Every word,” Steve says, straightforward like it’s the truth. Like he can make it so, whatever he says he’ll do, by willpower alone.  
  
“I know.” And whatever they’re talking about, there’s no lie in what Tony says and no false appeasement in what he says next. “I was going to call you.”  
  
His voice is tight with an earnest and urgent desperation as if he waited months to say something he wasn’t sure that he would be able to, as if he now has a small window to do so before he loses his chance forever.  
  
Steve breaks their gaze, something complicated that Natasha can’t decipher crossing his face but Tony can.  
  
“I didn’t know until I lost my chance, but I was. I need you to know that,” he continues, quieter but no less emphatic. He takes a step forward, closing the remaining distance between them. “Steve,” he whispers, echoing everything Steve said in his name back to him, and when he curls his hand around the crook of Steve’s arm, Steve shakes apart like Atlas forgiven, an earthquake trembling through him as he’s finally permitted to lay the heavens at his feet and rest.  
  
The bridge has been swept away, but they’re on the same bank now, Tony pulling Steve to his feet onto safer ground.  
  
“I would’ve been late even if you did.” The confession comes out bitter, a knife pointed inwards. “I would’ve lost—” Steve’s voice is hoarse, mangled with regret. “I’m not letting that happen again. Even if you can’t trust me, you have me at your side, Tony. No matter what.”  
  
Thanos destroyed so much, razing everything to the ground and leaving behind scorched earth, but something fragile blooms in Tony’s eyes as Steve places his hand over his.  
  
It’s small and barely there, little more than a tender, green seedling but there nonetheless, the start of a new beginning pushing through the ashes, germinated by wildfire.  
  
“You have me through everything,” Steve vows softly, and when he pulls Tony to him and Tony comes willingly, answering his embrace, Natasha watches as something new is born, something worth fighting for as much as the people they lost. A future that’s vulnerable but full of promise, of love and forgiveness. A future that survived and will survive impossible odds, life unbeaten by death.


End file.
